Net tons through the Suez Canal in 2025 came to 0.52 billion vs. 1.41 billion in 2022, down 63%

 Trump's 7-week Operation Rough Rider against the Houthis was a total, and expensive, failure, compounding Biden's.

The pirates and terrorists won in the Red Sea.

... The first month alone of Trump’s bombing campaign cost more than $1 billion in weapons and munitions. ... 

 

 

 

Trump captures Maduro on the sixth anniversary of his Soleimani assassination lol

 

... Explosions were reported in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, at about 2 a.m. local time (0600 GMT), according to images circulating on social media that could not be independently verified. ...

More.

... Soleimani was assassinated on 3 January 2020 around 1:00 a.m. local time (22:00 UTC 2 January),^[158] by a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad International Airport.^[159] 

More.

 

 

Jimmy Kimmel's opening riposte is so old it goes back to at least 1577 in the mouth of Luis de León, whose followers established The School of Salamanca

 

 Unamuno was removed from his two university chairs by the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1924, over the protests of other Spanish intellectuals. ... Unamuno returned to Spain after the fall of General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in 1930 and took up his rectorship again. It is said in Salamanca that the day he returned to the university, Unamuno began his lecture by saying, as Fray Luis de León had done after four years of imprisonment by the Spanish Inquisition, "As we were saying yesterday..." (Decíamos ayer...).       

More. 

This is risible propaganda posing as news from The Hill, which is the same Nexstar which pulled Kimmel's show

Is DePauw University also a subsidiary of Nexstar?

And how much was this guy paid to write this? 

Kimmel's Ratings in Steep Decline, ABC Looked for Way Out

Jeffrey McCall, The Hill Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media Inc.

This university pinhead pretends that ABC's way out of Jimmy Kimmel isn't called his $48 million contract, which expires in mere months. 

Kimmel isn't some dummy who didn't know he would be likely headed out the door very soon anyway.

He himself said as much already in February 2024, long before any of this Charlie Kirk business happened:

On February 21, 2024, Kimmel hinted that he may not renew his contract for further seasons after his current contract expires in May 2026 in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, stating that "I think this is my final contract, I hate to even say it, because everyone's laughing at me now — each time I think that, and then it turns out to be not the case. I still have a little more than two years left on my contract, and that seems pretty good, that seems like enough."^[22][23] 

 

How do you like your news being manipulated by the State Capitalist Pigs?

 

Oh, oh yeah, this is only an op-ed, not news. Sure. 

 

Stop making me like Jimmy Kimmel now! 

I don't trust either of these guys as far as I can throw them

 

In 2016 J. D. Vance and Pete Hegseth were both conventional NeverTrumpers, and had not been particularly religious.

Hegseth was for Marco Rubio in 2015-16 originally, and then for Ted Cruz before acquiescing to Trump. Vance didn't come around to Trump until 2021, whom he needed in his run for US Senate in 2022 from Ohio.

 

Pete supposedly had a religious transformation in 2018, according to new Wikipedia information, which however contradicts itself:

 

"He has said that he underwent a religious transformation in 2018 following his marriage to his third wife" but

 

"Hegseth and Rauchet, who has three young children from her first marriage, married on August 16, 2019."

 

Oops. Sounds like it was more like 2019, but who really knows? Wikipedia only found out yesterday that Hegseth was born on June 6, 1980. How does this country approve a SECDEF without knowing until now when he was even born?

 

Meanwhile J. D. converted to Catholicism in 2019, what a coincidence, but was an atheist roughly until he was in law school at Yale during the first Obama administration. His "faith" is primarily intellectual by his own admission.

 

And now look at the two of 'em lol.

 

Phony baloney plastic banana good time rock 'n rollas who lick their fingers, stick them in the air, and check whichaway the wind comin' from uh huh.

 

 

 

For a man who promotes himself as a Christian, SECDEF nominee Pete Hegseth sure has A LOT of VERY RECENT sooty baggage involving consensual sexual encounters dotting his timeline

Trump defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth denies sexual assault allegation, acknowledges payment to accuser

“In 2023, Hegseth paid the complainant as part of a civil confidential settlement agreement and maintains his innocence,” Timothy Parlatore, Hegseth’s attorney, said in a statement.

He also denied that the encounter between Hegseth and an unnamed woman, which she alleges happened in 2017, was sexual assault. ...

Parlatore denied the allegation, saying, “This is a situation where a consensual encounter occurred and, unfortunately, the woman had to come up with a lie to explain why the woman had not come back to her husband’s room that night.”

 

His Wikipedia entry indicates he cheated on his second! wife sometime in 2016 with Fox executive producer Jennifer Rauchet who had his baby in August 2017. By October 2017 he's cheating on her! with a married woman! also supposedly conservative! referenced in the confidential settlement by CNBC:

Hegseth and his first wife, Meredith Schwarz, divorced in 2009.

He married his second wife, Samantha Deering, in 2010; they have three children.

In August 2017, while still married to Deering, Hegseth had a daughter with Fox executive producer Jennifer Rauchet, with whom he was having an extramarital relationship.^[25] He and Deering divorced in August 2017.

Hegseth and Rauchet, who has three young children from her first marriage, married in August 2019.^[69]

Hegseth lives in Tennessee. He is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship,^[70] a church in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.^[71][72]

In October 2017, a 30-year-old conservative group staffer accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her in a hotel room after he spoke at a California Federation of Republican Women event in Monterey, California.^[73] She went to an emergency room the next day for a rape kit test.^[74] Hegseth described the allegations as a "he-said, she-said" dispute about a consensual encounter.^[75] No charges were filed in the case.^[73] Hegseth paid the accuser as part of a non-disclosure agreement in 2020.^[76]

 

Who's going to tell them?

 Another messaging train wreck.

Milwaukee last had a Republican mayor in 1908. It ranks 25th for overall crime out of the 100 most populous cities in America in 2019.

Detroit last had a Republican mayor in 1962. Ranks 8th for crime.

Philadelphia last had a Republican mayor in 1952. Ranks 51st for crime.

 

Trump and Harris agreeing on ending the filibuster rule reminds me of McCain and Obama agreeing on something inadvisable in 2008

 

They both interrupted their campaigns to vote for TARP on October 1, 2008, which became law on Friday, October 3, but did nothing to stop the panic.

On Monday, October 6 Jim Cramer came on the Today Show at 7am and told people who needed their money in the next five years to sell their stocks.

The S&P 500 fell from 1099 to 848 by October 27th, almost 23%, on its way to the March 9, 2009 closing low at 676 (there was an intraday low of 666 on March 6).

Over 500 bank failures marked the era fueled by these events, and more than 6 million lost their homes.

And no one went to jail.

Nothing good will come of ending the filibuster, either, not with the country this divided.

 

Can you spot the year when your home became just another commodity?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Relief_Act_of_1997

Before becoming publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune just over a year ago, Steve Grove worked for . . . Tim Walz!

 

In April 2023, Steve Grove became the new publisher as Michael Klingensmith stepped down. Grove was the head of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development under Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.^[45] He formerly worked as a reporter and a Google executive, leading the Google News Lab. Klingensmith has served as publisher since 2010.^[20]

^{-- Wikipedia} 

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are a threat to the First Amendment

 

Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) may have been a social studies teacher, but he would have failed Constitutional Law 101, especially the part about the First Amendment.

“There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy,” Walz said on MSNBC in December 2022, which would be news to the Supreme Court, which unanimously held as recently as 2017 that “speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground” is still protected by the First Amendment.

Walz’s impulse to censor speech he does not like is most definitely shared by his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, who pushed for Twitter and Facebook to censor then-President Donald Trump even before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. In Iowa, on Oct. 19, 2019, Harris told Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, “This is not a matter of free speech. … This is a matter of holding corporate America and these Big Tech companies responsible and accountable for what they are facilitating.”

Harris’s anti-free speech position was so extreme that even Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pushed back, saying she wanted to kick Trump only out of the White House, not off social media. But politburo secretariat officer Kamala did not back down. “I’m calling on everyone to join me,” she said.

By 2019, Harris already had a well-established history of using government power to silence voices she does not like.

Read how she, oopsie, published the private data she collected as Attorney General of California online here.

She's a doxxer.

Border Czar Kamala Harris

 

Wikipedia insists Kamala Harris' father Donald Harris isn't a Marxist, based on a New York Times article which says no such thing

Wikipedia here (at least right now lol):

 

 

Harris's economic philosophy was critical of mainstream economics and questioned orthodox assumptions. He was once erroneously described as a "Marxist scholar".^[15]

 

15. [Barry, Ellen (August 21, 2020). "Kamala Harris's father, a footnote in her speeches, is a prominent economist". The New York Times. Retrieved August 24, 2020.

 

 

 

Kamala Harris’s father, a footnote in her speeches, is a prominent economist:

 

Despite his low profile in the election cycle, Dr. Harris is not an obscure figure. He was the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics department, and a prominent critic of mainstream economic theory from the left. The Stanford Daily, reporting in 1976, described him as a “Marxist scholar,” and said there was some opposition to granting him tenure because he was “too charismatic, a pied piper leading students astray from neo-Classical economics.”

 

In the 1970s "Marxians" flew under the banner of "heterodox economics" to avoid opprobrium, and were promoted by entities such as the Union for Radical Political Economics which promoted Harris at Stanford, and, um, Harris' students in 1974 sure thought he was one, lol:

 

 

 

Jonathan Turley: This moment did not occur in a vacuum, it occurred in a time when our leaders long abandoned reason for rage

 

President Biden has stoked this rage rhetoric. In 2022, Biden held his controversial speech before Independence Hall where he denounced Trump supporters as enemies of the people. Biden recently referenced the speech and has embraced the claims that this could be our last democratic election. ...

As soon as Trump was elected, unhinged rage became the norm as with Kathy Griffin featuring herself holding the bloody severed head of Trump. ...

For months, people have heard politicians and press call Trump “Hitler” and the GOP a Nazi movement. Some compared stopping Trump to stopping Hitler in 1933. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) declared Trump “is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy and he has to be eliminated.” He later apologized. ...

The media has been quick to denounce reckless rhetoric from the right while largely ignoring the same language on the left. That included threats against conservative Supreme Court justices before the assassination plot against Brett Kavanaugh.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) went to the steps of the Supreme Court and called out Kavanaugh by name: “I want to tell you, (Justice Neil) Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” ...

This moment did not occur in a vacuum; it occurred in a time when our leaders long abandoned reason for rage.

Read the whole thing here.

 

Greek historian Victor Davis Hanson, born in 1953, flips his lid, laughably blames every single problem in America today on the Baby Boomers in a wildly insane rant, my favorite being . . .

 

 . . . the Baby Boomers destroyed the southern border . . ..

Here.

Immigration policy in the United States was forever radically altered in 1965, by no one born in the Baby Boom.

The average age of a US Representative in 1965 was 51.4, the Congress of which overwhelmingly passed the destructive reform 320-70, which ended the American commitment to social homogeneity prevailing from the 1920s.

This was an act of American hubris, born of victory in WWII. One would think Hanson would know about that.

Their average birth year puts them in 1914, children of the mentally-ill Progressive Era (1896–1917) which gave us the income tax (1909), popular election of senators (1913), prohibition of alcohol (1919), and women's suffrage (1920), all of which were sufferable as long as their was social stability. Well, except for the prohibition.

The biggest problem affecting Baby Boomers is a lazy attention to our own history, and perhaps self-hatred.

Vanguard's long term Treasury fund, started in 1986, set a new all time low price record yesterday: What a coincidence

 VUSTX fell to $7.37 yesterday, October 19, 2023.

Until the bond debacle of 2022, the lowest price ever was set way back in 1987, also on October 19, aka Black Monday, when the S&P 500 crashed 20.47% in its worst single day ever.

2022's new all time low for VUSTX at 8.16 had occurred on October 24, missing the anniversary of the old all time low by just three days. Also a very odd coincidence.

The debacle has only continued in 2023, and VUSTX prices haven't seen $8 since September 22nd.

ZIRP since the Great Recession is ultimately to blame for the current mess in long term Treasury securities. The clamor it created for yield drove bond investors long, culminating in the highest nominal prices ever paid for long term UST in March 2020, and the lowest yields. 30Y UST yield crashed to 0.99% on March 9, 2020, 20Y to 0.87%. Yields across the board in 2023 for 2Y to 30Y have set records for this cycle in October. Yesterday 20Y demanded 5.30%, 30Y 5.11%.

No one wants that 2020 and prior junk now, so wherever it sits it's causing collateral problems, at banks, insurance companies, pension funds, et cetera. And on the Fed's balance sheet: As of October 18th the Fed has $1.503922 trillion of UST maturing in more than 10 years on its balance sheet. It basically has to keep it until it matures, and it pays it very little to return to the Treasury as it does.

Are prices done falling?

Confident pretenders said so a year ago this month, and now here we are with $TLT investors down another 12.22% since then.

Given the obscene overvaluation of stocks, and the demand for higher yields by bond investors, cash still seems the safest place to be. VMRXX, Vanguard Cash Reserves Federal Money Market Fund Admiral Shares, has returned 4.00% ytd. You continue to lose to inflation, however.

Nothing is ever perfect.

 

1987 high and low

2022 high and low to the left, all time high and low to the right

Abraham Lincoln started The War Between The States while under the influence of blue-mass, which gave him mercury poisoning and made him really angry

He took the pills for depression before the war, and didn't quit them until approximately June of 1865.

 

Wikipedia, here, so it must be true right?

 

For several years before his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln is known to have taken blue-mass pills for treatment of chronic melancholia.^[5]

 

It’s been reported that during this time, Lincoln was known to have experienced neurological symptoms, including insomnia, tremor and rage attacks, which suggests he may have been suffering from mercury poisoning.

 

 

 

 

 

However, a few months after his inauguration, Lincoln reportedly stopped taking the medication because he perceived the pills made him "cross".^[5]

 

In 2001, a study led by renowned public-health investigator Norbert Hirschhorn recreated a typical formulation,^[6]concluding that the quantity of blue mass that Lincoln likely took would have delivered "a daily dose of mercury exceeding the current Environmental Protection Agency safety standard by over 9000 times,"^[5] which may have adversely affected his health.

 

5."Lincoln's Little Blue Pills"(Press release). ScienceDaily: University Of Chicago Medical Center. 19 July 2001. Retrieved 2021-09-10.

 

6.  Hirschhorn, Norbert; Feldman, Robert G.; Greaves, Ian (Summer 2001). "Abraham Lincoln's Blue Pills: Did Our 16th President Suffer from Mercury Poisoning?". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. Johns Hopkins University Press. 44 (3): 315–322. doi:10.1353/pbm.2001.0048. PMID 11482002. S2CID 37918186. Retrieved 2021-09-10.

OPEC expects global oil demand to rise to 110 million barrels per day by 2045

 Reported here.

2022 global production averaged 80.6 million barrels per day on one accounting.

OPEC must think the 2022 figure closer to 90 million bpd since it projects growth in demand of 23%.

According to this, crude oil remained the top primary energy source in the world at 31.2% in 2020, followed by coal at 27.2%, and natural gas at 24.7%.

71% of China's primary energy is derived from coal. China is the world's number one emitter of so-called greenhouse gases.

You remember the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, right?

 Chickens . . . comin' home . . . to roost!

 

Studies have found the Dodd–Frank Act has improved financial stability . . .  lol

 

Fats Domino would just like to say that Monday's been a mess since at least 1956

 . . . popularized in a recording by Fats Domino in 1956, also on Imperial (catalog # 5417), on which the songwriting credit was shared between him and Bartholomew.   

More.